Why Republicans Still Reject the Science of Global WarmingOnly one major political party in the world denies climate change, and it'sin charge of the most important political body in the world

November 3, 2016More NewsThe Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are HereWill the Paris Climate Deal Save the World?Why Young Americans Are Suing Obama Over Climate ChangeAll StoriesOne day in 2009, Henry Waxman, the Democratic congressman representing SantaMonica and Malibu, paid a visit to one of his Republican counterparts, aruddy-faced Texan named Joe Barton. After Democrats had won back the House ofRepresentatives the previous year, Waxman staged an intraparty coup andseized the chairman's gavel of the Energy and Commerce committee, whichoversees most legislation on the environment. He vowed to address what he sawas the gravest threat facing the planet: climate change. As an openinggesture, Waxman approached Barton, the committee's top Republican, aboutfinding a way to work together on the new legislation.

For decades, climate-change deniers got away with dismissing the growing bodyof science as speculation and guesswork, hysterical or politicized warningsof a disastrous future. Now, their church is crumbling. Every month of thisyear set a new record for the hottest monthly average global temperature inhistory. Fifteen of the 16 hottest years ever recorded have occurred in the21st century. The facts are at our doorstep in the form of drought-fueledwildfires ravaging Southern California; rising sea levels in New York,Norfolk, Virginia, and Miami Beach; melting glaciers in Alaska; bleachedcoral reefs in the Virgin Islands. We've reached the point where the planet'swarming  and the extreme weather it causes  is outpacing the very modelsscientists use to predict the future.

U.S. President Barack Obama, left, meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping onthe sidelines of the COP21 United Nations Climate Change Conference in LeBourget, outside Paris, Monday, Nov. 30, 2015President Obama meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines ofthe COP21 climate change conference near Paris last November. Evan Vucci/APThe good news is this: Practically every nation on Earth grasps the severityof the problem. In Paris last year, 195 countries, including the biggestemitters on the planet  the United States, China and India  came togetherand offered real, substantive plans to curb their emissions of greenhousegases. Long before Paris, the renewable-energy revolution was underway Germany can now power up to 87 percent of the country using renewablesources, and in some areas of Australia wind power meets 100 percent ofdemand for electricity. In September, Chinese president Xi Jinping andPresident Barack Obama announced that their countries would ratify the ParisAgreement. The Chinese leader's public comments at the event  "Our responseto climate change bears on the future of our people and the well-being ofmankind"  would've been unthinkable a decade ago.

In fact, about the only place left on Earth where lawmakers openly and avidlydeny the science of climate change is the U.S. Congress. More to the point,says Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii and a leader on climatepolicy, "There is only one major political party in the world that denies theexistence of climate change. And it happens to be in charge of the mostimportant political body in the world."

At this summer's Republican National Convention, the party faithful approvedtheir official platform for the next four years. It reads like a denier'sChristmas wish list, with nearly every point receiving the full-throatedsupport of the party nominee, Donald Trump: Build the Keystone XL pipeline,cancel the Clean Power Plan, neuter the EPA and ban it from regulating carbondioxide, outlaw a carbon tax, stop all fracking regulations. The broader theconsensus outside Washington that climate change is real and man-made, themore elaborate Republicans get in refuting its existence. To hear Sen. TedCruz (R-Texas) tell it, climate change is a global conspiracy cooked up byliberals who want to institute "massive government control of the economy,the energy sector and every aspect of our lives."

House Republicans have subpoenaed the government's top climatologists.They've invited discredited deniers to testify before Congress. They've evenfought the Pentagon  a normally untouchable institution in the halls ofCongress  over climate change. Twice this year, the House GOP majority votedto block the Defense Department from studying the national-securityimplications of climate change. In the words of one House Republican, Rep.David McKinley of West Virginia, the military's efforts amount to partisangimmicks and distractions from fighting terrorism. "Why should Congressdivert funds from the mission of our military and national security," hewrote to colleagues in 2014, "to support a political ideology?"

Republicans who've dared to buck party orthodoxy end up as cautionary tales.Take Bob Inglis, a six-term congressman with an independent streak whorepresented the South Carolina upcountry region. During his 2010 re-electioncampaign, Inglis told a local radio host that climate change was real andhumans were responsible. His primary challenger, a local prosecutor namedTrey Gowdy, hammered Inglis as an out-of-touch kook more worried about carbontaxes than the lives of his constituents. Inglis lost to Gowdy by astaggering 42 percentage points. "The most enduring heresy that Icommitted," Inglis later said, "was saying the climate change is real andlet's do something about it."

Inglis, who now runs a group that promotes conservative-friendly solutions toclimate change, is uniquely suited to diagnose what's gone wrong with hisparty. Aside from the fears of being ousted from office by angry party hard-liners, Inglis says, the GOP is stuck in a cycle of "rejectionism," the totalrefusal to believe or concede any fact associated with the opposing side, nomatter how many experts attest to its veracity: "It's a rejection of thescience, rejection of all things Obama and rejection of the idea that we cancome together to solve really big challenges."

It wasn't always so. A Republican president  Richard Nixon  signed into lawthe Clean Air Act, approved the Council on Environmental Quality andestablished the two federal agencies most focused on climate change today:the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and AtmosphericAdministration. In Nixon's day, environmental protection enjoyed bipartisansupport. At the signing of the Clean Air Act in December 1970, which passedCongress with near unanimity, Nixon hailed it as "a historic piece oflegislation that put us far down the road toward a goal that TheodoreRoosevelt, 70 years ago, spoke eloquently about: a goal of clean air, cleanwater and open spaces for the future generations of America."

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 kick-started the conservative backlashto the environmental movement. The new administration slashed funding forregulators, laid off renewable-energy researchers and famously removed thesolar panels installed on the White House roof by Jimmy Carter. Theultraconservative House Republican Study Committee issued a "special report"titled "The Specter of Environmentalism," which cast activists as"extremists" trying to block mining operations while snatching private landaway from its owners. Reagan's Interior secretary, James Watt, called theenvironmental movement a "left-wing cult" and said his job was to "follow theScriptures, which call upon us to occupy the land until Jesus returns."

Yet even Reagan saw the wisdom in signing the Montreal Protocol to protectthe ozone layer, one of the great success stories in the environmentalmovement. It took a new generation of hard-line Republican politicians, ledby House Speaker Newt Gingrich, to make the environment a partisan issuewhile positioning the GOP as the party of the fossil-fuel industry. Oil, gasand coal companies had typically divided their campaign donations evenlybetween the two parties; now they began funneling tens of millions of dollarsto the GOP  two and three times more than Democrats received  and intofront groups and sham think tanks working to undermine climate science. Flushwith cash, the Republican leadership "started running the Congress from thetop down," Waxman recalls. "Committees had less and less say over policy,decisions were made at the level of the speaker, and a lot of legislation wasbeing drafted behind closed doors with special interests."

Republicans cloaked their agenda in the language of "deregulation" and"balancing the budget"; a New York Times editorial called it a "masterpieceof legislative subterfuge." It was only natural, then, that in 2000, the GOPpicked as its standard-bearers George W. Bush, the scion of an oil-moneyfamily, and Dick Cheney, a former CEO of an oil-services company.

The last real effort Republicans made to work with Democrats on climatechange brought together some of the biggest names in Congress: Republicansenators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, Democrat John Kerry and IndependentJoe Lieberman. McCain and Lieberman had introduced cap-and-trade legislationon three different occasions, and McCain, during his 2008 presidentialcampaign, had said, "We stand warned by serious and credible scientistsacross the world that time is short and the dangers are great." But facing afar-right primary challenger, McCain abandoned the effort early on, and theso-called Kerry-Graham-Lieberman coalition collapsed in spectacular fashionamid bickering with the Obama administration and outside conservativepressure. Their bill was never put up for a vote.

In the years since, the GOP has only descended further into the madness ofanti-science denialism. And it's not enough to say Republicans have retreatedon the issue to protect themselves against well-funded primary challengers.Today, denying climate change is a winning stance, the sure path to loads ofcampaign cash, plus a way to wage ideological war on the Democratic Party.With the GOP takeover of Congress, the most ardent deniers have been rewardedwith leadership positions on the committees that oversee our nation's climatepolicies.

Look no further than Texas Republican Lamar Smith, the chair of the HouseScience Committee, who has received nearly $700,000 from oil and gascompanies (more than any other industry) and launched a crusade to intimidatescientists at NOAA and the Union of Concerned Scientists over climateresearch. Since Smith took over in 2013, the Science Committee has issuedmore subpoenas than in the preceding 54 years. Jim Inhofe, chair of theSenate Environment and Public Works Committee, has gone even further, seekingto block the Obama administration's efforts to limit methane emissions andregulate the impact of fracking on water supplies. But what else could weexpect from a man whose biggest funders include Exxon and Koch Industries,who brought a snowball to the Senate floor to disprove global warming and whobelieves climate change is the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated"?

Rep. David Jolly of Florida is one of the rare Republicans to speak out onclimate change. Talking to me from the speaker's balcony one recent morning,he traced the current inaction to the deep sense of divide and party anger inCongress. "I have colleagues who tell me the climate-change science is notreal," Jolly says. "They say it with conviction, and I think it's simplybecause this issue generationally was introduced in a highly toxic politicalclimate where both sides of the aisle dug in their heels and hardened theirpositions. And so because of that, I think that legacy has stayed within ourparty."

As the evidence piles up that climate change is real and man-made, and anexistential threat to the planet's future, Americans of all ideologies arecoming around. A 2016 poll conducted by researchers at Yale and George MasonUniversity found that three in four registered voters believe the Earth iswarming, and more than half believe humans are causing it. The poll's biggestshift occurred among conservative Republicans: The number of those saying theclimate is changing jumped by 19 percent from two years earlier. ExxonMobilCEO Rex Tillerson accepts the prevailing research. Even Charles Koch hasbegun to see the light. A top executive at Koch Industries caused a stir thispast spring when she said, "Charles has said the climate is changing. So theclimate is changing. I think he's also said, and we believe, that humans havea part in that." In a subsequent interview with The Washington Post, Kochhimself didn't dispute the facts of climate change. "There is some sciencebehind it," he said. "There are greenhouse gases, and they do contribute towarming."

Yet Koch is largely responsible for the one factor that helps explain why somany Republicans cling to their denier talking points (from sunspots andmidcentury global cooling to "I'm not a scientist"). The GOP has come to relyon (and fear) the spigot of campaign cash from the fossil-fuel industry. TheKoch brothers and their donor pals have pledged $889 million to push theirconservative agenda in 2016. "The Republican voters have moved, theRepublican icons have moved, but the Republicans elected won't move," saysTom Steyer, the billionaire environmentalist. "Isn't that interesting? Youhave 889 million reasons to go against the facts, the voters and theiricons."

Oil and gas companies know that they've all but lost the war of publicopinion on the truth of climate change. So instead they have trained theirfirepower on a single party in a single place in hopes of blocking progress."They came to the key strategic choke point: Congress," says Sen. SheldonWhitehouse (D-R.I.). A leading voice on the climate front, Whitehouse hasdelivered nearly 150 speeches on the Senate floor, urging action and callingout "the Web of Denial," the network of secretly funded groups that peddledoubt on climate change. "They put a choke chain on the Republican Party thatthey gave a couple of hard yanks to say, 'Line up with us.'"

It's a strategy born of desperation, but a clever one all the same. "Theypunished the Bob Inglises," Whitehouse says. "They silenced the McCains. Theygot [Senate Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell totally in their corner with thefloods of money they're pouring in to support his candidates. And once theyhad accomplished that, they were able to take what is essentially dirty,traditional, special-interest pleading and make it look like part of thepartisan wars."

According to congressional Democrats, plenty of Republicans in the House andSenate know the truth about climate  most of them just won't come out andsay it. Whitehouse tells me he knows a dozen Senate Republicans who want tohelp on climate change but say they can't, for political reasons. Sen. BrianSchatz of Hawaii recalls one Republican senator telling him, "I'm not crazyon this stuff, but we've got to wait till Obama's gone." The Republicans hetalks to "find their own position embarrassing," Schatz says, but thatembarrassment has yet to outweigh the fear of losing their primaries. "Partof the evolution that has to occur is they have to be more scared of pro-climate voters than these Super PACs that threaten them."

Even without Republican help, Democrats in Congress have managed to notchmajor victories in the fight against climate change, such as the 2015 renewalof key tax credits for the solar and wind industries. President Obama, actingunilaterally, has begun to phase out the coal-fired plants around the countrywith the Clean Power Plan. But in reality, the kind of sweeping, historiclegislation needed to address the threats facing our fast-changing planet picture a New Deal or a Great Society for the climate  can happen only whenCongress wills itself to act.

There are initial signs that heretics exist within the Church of Carbon. Thisyear's creation of the Climate Solutions Caucus, a group of 20 House membersequally divided among Democrats and Republicans, is evidence of an awakeningto the reality that waiting one day more to act on climate change is one daytoo long. But Jolly, the Republican congressman, says he doesn't expect muchmore movement in the current crop of GOP lawmakers. "It might take another 10years for a new generation of Republicans to take a new approach to this," hesays. Inglis, for his part, is somewhat more optimistic. He says he believesit's only a matter of time before the ravages of climate change  floodedcities, resource conflicts, extreme heat in the summers and unbearable coldin the winters  persuade his fellow Republicans to emerge from hiding. "It'san unsustainable position," he says. "We're gonna change. The question iswhether we change fast enough."

A new batch of 5,000 emails among scientists central to the assertionthat humans are causing a global warming crisis were anonymouslyreleased to the public yesterday, igniting a new firestorm ofcontroversy nearly two years to the day after similar emails ignited theClimategate scandal.

Three themes are emerging from the newly released emails: (1) prominentscientists central to the global warming debate are taking measures toconceal rather than disseminate underlying data and discussions; (2)these scientists view global warming as a political “cause” rather thana balanced scientific inquiry and (3) many of these scientists franklyadmit to each other that much of the science is weak and dependent ondeliberate manipulation of facts and data.

Regarding scientific transparency, a defining characteristic of scienceis the open sharing of scientific data, theories and procedures so thatindependent parties, and especially skeptics of a particular theory orhypothesis, can replicate and validate asserted experiments orobservations. Emails between Climategate scientists, however, show aconcerted effort to hide rather than disseminate underlying evidence andprocedures.

“I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information]Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be todelete all emails at the end of the process,”writes Phil Jones, ascientist working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel onClimate Change (IPCC), in a newly released email.

“Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the researchgrants we get – and has to be well hidden,” Jones writes in anothernewly released email. “I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S.Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing theoriginal station data.”

The original Climategate emails contained similar evidence of destroyinginformation and data that the public would naturally assume would beavailable according to freedom of information principles. “Mike, can youdelete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [UNIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Assessment]?” Jones wroteto Penn State University scientist Michael Mann in an email released inClimategate 1.0. “Keith will do likewise. ... We will be getting Caspar[Ammann] to do likewise. I see that CA [the Climate Audit Web site]claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!”

The new emails also reveal the scientists’ attempts to politicize thedebate and advance predetermined outcomes.

“The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e]what’s included and what is left out” of IPCC reports, writes JonathanOverpeck, coordinating lead author for the IPCC’s most recent climateassessment.

“I gave up on [Georgia Institute of Technology climate professor] JudithCurry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but its nothelping the cause,” wrote Mann in another newly released email.

“I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding aninvestigative journalist to investigate and expose” skeptical scientistSteve McIntyre, Mann writes in another newly released email.

These new emails add weight to Climategate 1.0 emails revealing effortsto politicize the scientific debate. For example, Tom Wigley, ascientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research,authored a Climategate 1.0 email asserting that his fellow Climategatescientists “must get rid of” the editor for a peer-reviewed sciencejournal because he published some papers contradicting assertions of aglobal warming crisis.

More than revealing misconduct and improper motives, the newly releasedemails additionally reveal frank admissions of the scientificshortcomings of global warming assertions.

“Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropicaltroposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discounta wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need tocommunicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can findtime to discuss these further if necessary,” writes Peter Thorne of theUK Met Office.

“I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spinon it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run,”Thorne adds.

“Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive ... there have been anumber of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authorsand by IPCC,” Wigley acknowledges.

More damaging emails will likely be uncovered during the next few daysas observers pour through the 5,000 emails. What is already clear,however, is the need for more objective research and ethical conduct bythe scientists at the heart of the IPCC and the global warming discussion.

James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at The HeartlandInstitute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News.